Seymour Hersh discusses his controversial best seller
The Dark Side of Camelot -- why he wrote it, why it's right, and why
historians of John F. Kennedy's presidency have been wrong

January 8, 1998

When one of the country's best and most feared investigative journalists turned
his attention to the myth of Camelot, it was clear that John F. Kennedy's
reputation was going to take a beating. It was less clear that the journalist
himself would be attacked so vociferously. Reviewers of Seymour Hersh's The
Dark Side of Camelot (1997) have reacted almost universally with anger and
disdain at the book's claims -- including that Kennedy caused the Cuban Missile
Crisis through his continued attempts to have Castro killed, that he only won
the 1960 election by enlisting the mob's help, and that he was secretly married
during his first term in Congress. Hersh stands by his work, however, saying that
people are tearing it apart because, "they don't want to hear what I have to
say."

"The Cultural Meaning of the Kennedys," by Steven Stark (January, 1994)
"To be sure, the Kennedys have had -- and continue to have -- a political impact on the nation.... But politics hasn't been this family's calling card in the mass culture for some time. Even in the aggregate
the Kennedys have never had the political impact of Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, or even Reagan. If President Kennedy is still
revered today, it's more because of his glamorous style and because he died young than for any specific accomplishments."

What was your impression of Kennedy before you wrote this book? How has your
understanding of him changed as a result?

I was like everybody else: I knew John F. Kennedy at a distance as a
beautiful young man. I was a young reporter in Chicago when he was President,
and I thrilled to the idea that he was a man's man. I wept when he was killed.
But I developed a great deal of skepticism about him and his policies as I
became more involved in Vietnam. I always wondered how we got into Vietnam, and
I really didn't get much of an answer. It was not something that people were
very interested in, even in the seventies. Johnson got most of the blame. We
were mad at Johnson, and then Nixon, as the war went on. Johnson expanded the
American presence from 17,000 troops in 1963 to 550,000 a few years later, which looked
horrid. But if you looked at Kennedy's record, which I have, it was a steady
escalation. The other thing that troubled me was the Pentagon Papers, which
came out in 1971. They showed that the Kennedy Administration had lied just as
assiduously as the Johnson Administration about what was going on.

This book originated not from me but from an editor -- Jim Silberman of Little,
Brown. I resisted it for a few years -- I'm sure because it was someone else's
idea -- but eventually started doing it, initially looking at the fascination
with Kennedy and eventually turning it into a political history. Jim thought
that there was something there. He had been the editor of my book on Kissinger,
and that proved to be darker than we'd thought. I had no idea that the Kennedy
story would be as bad as it was.

You write at the beginning of your book that your central finding was that
"Kennedy's private life and personal obsessions -- his character -- affected
the affairs of the nation and its foreign policy far more than has ever been
known." Many reviewers have quarreled with this assertion, saying, essentially,
that you have overplayed the relationship between private and public actions in
order to write about the sordid details of Kennedy's private life. How would
you respond to this criticism?

My thesis is you can't really separate the private recklessness from the public
recklessness. There's simply a continuum. You can't say to me that someone can
be as reckless in their private life as he was and not have evidence of that in
his public life. And I think the Cuban Missile Crisis is a classic example. He
took us to the edge of World War Three. I think the one thing you have to
remember about John F. Kennedy and the missile crisis is that Kennedy and his
brother Robert understood more than anyone else, with the exception of Nikita
Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, how much Kennedy's reckless desire to have Castro
assassinated led to the missile crisis.

There's no question that what the Secret Service men had to say about Kennedy's
private life is relevant and historically important. The notion that I'm using
it in some sort of titillating way amuses me to no end. I'm sorry I collected
it; I'm sorry they put it on the record; I'm sorry it offended people. But once
Secret Service agents are willing to go on the record about what happened in
the White House, there's no way I'm not writing it. I would be totally
negligent and deceitful not to. Suppose I'd decided not to write it, and people
learned that. I'd be accused of covering up history. The issue for me is that a
lot of people criticized a lot of things in this book because they really don't
want to hear what I have to say.

Trust me, with the Secret Service guys -- are you kidding? There's a whole
other level I didn't get into; some of the sexual stuff is even worse than
I've reported. When it comes to policy I'm tough, but when it comes to his
private life there's a million things I didn't write about.

You acknowledged in an interview with The Boston Globe that the now
much-publicized Cusack papers, which purported to show that JFK paid Marilyn
Monroe a large sum of money to keep quiet about their affair, were really what
got you started looking at the dark side of Kennedy. Would you have written the
book had you realized at the time that those papers were forged?

I didn't learn about those papers until I was about two years into the book, so
yes, I would have written it. In a funny way I'm glad the Cusack Paper scandal
happened. Given the pretty much universally hostile reception to my book, thank
God I had those papers, because otherwise I would have been accused of
falsifying everything. As far as I'm concerned, investigating those papers and
doing everything I did is part of the business. I've never been held to a
different standard like I have been this time. I've been criticized for a lot
of things I've written -- My Lai, CIA stuff -- but this is the first time I've
been criticized for what I thought. They were very sophisticated documents.
Sixty Minutes did a show exposing them but that was only after they
spent two months believing them. The Washington Post was among my
biggest critics, but last time I looked they got a Pulitzer Prize for a story that
was fake. So it's not as simple as you think. The bottom line is that I didn't
publish them. I don't understand what's so bad about chasing a story, finding
out it's not real, and saying so.

Almost no one comes off looking good in your book -- you recount that Lyndon
Johnson may have blackmailed his way into the vice-presidency, that Richard
Nixon accepted bribes, and that Eisenhower, like Kennedy, was pushing for
Castro's assassination. Was Kennedy more corrupt than other post-Second World
War Presidents?

Kennedy was much more corrupt than other post-war Presidents, by a major
factor. Much more manipulative, though Nixon was a close second. There's
nothing wonderful about Nixon, Watergate proved that, but I think that Nixon
was an amateur compared to Kennedy. Kennedy's beauty made him more corrupt. He
was above the law; he didn't think anything could stop him.

The four Secret Service agents whom you interview provide new details about
the party atmosphere that surrounded Kennedy -- co-ed pool parties at the White
House, and a constant stream of prostitutes and Hollywood starlets who were
brought to see the President. How was this able to go on for three years
without creating a scandal?

The power of beauty. Obviously a lot of reporters knew a bunch about it; they
thought it was cute, I guess. Nobody knew quite as much as the agents did, and
nobody had ever asked them to speak before. The real question is how come we
finally are learning about this now, and the answer is, because I asked them.
If somebody had asked them earlier, they would have talked, I think. Why didn't
one of the girls talk? That was one of the questions I've been frequently
asked. Look what is happening to me thirty-five years after Kennedy's death.
Look at the heat. So imagine if you'd tried to do this ten years after his
death, if you were a prostitute, or some fading movie star who wanted to tell
your story. You would have been trashed to no end. The only thing that made it
worth it is that a lot of people are buying the book because there's word of
mouth on it -- when they read the book they're pleasantly surprised. It's no
different than my book on My Lai or any of the others. Same motives, same
attachments, same way I wrote, same evidence. I didn't change my standards. And
you know something? It's also right. And if I'm right an awful lot of
historians and journalists have been wrong, and that's something that nobody
wants to be faced with.

Kennedy was a very seductive man and a very pretty man, and a lot of people
responded to that. Americans are caught up in that sort of thing. When Princess
Di was killed we suffered as much as the British citizens. It wasn't Jack and
Jackie, the President and the First Lady, it was the King and his Queen.

Your description of how Johnson became the vice-presidential candidate
centers on the Kennedy campaign aide Hyman Raskin's assertion that Kennedy
selected Johnson as his running mate at the last minute because the Senate
majority leader had threatened blackmail. Yet Raskin admitted to you that there
have been dozens of other "authoritative" accounts of how Johnson became the
surprise choice. Why did you choose this one?

This is a new account, a different account. I didn't say this was the right
one. I was very careful. I said it's yet another account, one that's
interesting because most haven't heard it before and one that frankly makes
some sense to me. One of the things that Raskin said that's very perceptive --
which everybody seems to miss no matter how clearly you write it -- is that
with Stuart Symington they would have won California. I don't know why people
don't want to read this. The Kennedys didn't need Johnson to win the election.
They could have won with Symington too; that was the conventional wisdom. But
the spin they put on it afterward was that they needed Johnson to win Texas.
And that's the spin that got into history. There's something wrong with that
story and everyone knows it. Johnson's getting on the ticket was too surprising
for everybody.

The person who initially gave me the blackmail story was Michael Beschloss, a
respected historian-journalist. He wrote a book called The Crisis Years
on Kennedy and Khrushchev, a wonderful book published about five years ago. He
was the one who told me to go find Hyman Raskin, who lived next to his parents
in their retirement community. Turns out Michael had the same story, wrote it
the same way in his book. He used the same phrase I used -- "May have blackmailed
his way into the Vice Presidency." So it does get very close to a double
standard. I'm treating the information the same way that a perfectly rational
historian-cum-journalist did, and look at all the heat I get.

You argue that Kennedy's father brokered a deal with Sam Giancana, the head
of the Chicago mob, in which the mob would force the unions under its control
to vote for Kennedy in the 1960 election. Giancana expected that in return
government surveillance of the mob would lessen after the election. Why, then,
did Robert Kennedy as head of the Justice Department actually increase pressure
on the mob?

First, he didn't increase the pressure; he kept the pressure on. The FBI
produced a report for the Attorney General saying that the election had been
stolen in Illinois. They wanted a full-scale investigation, which, of course,
Robert Kennedy did not authorize. What was Robert Kennedy going to do? Suddenly
cut back his investigation of the mob? Do you think he could have gotten away
with it? I don't think he had any options but to continue the pressure. I also
think he wanted to keep up the pressure -- the Kennedys were great
existentialists. Once Giancana had delivered the election, they may have
thought: To hell with him, let's keep investigating.

There's something else that's very important: What's in it for the mob? From
the day Kennedy went into office until the day he died, he wanted to kill
Castro. What happens after Castro's death? A new government takes over in Cuba.
A government that permits the gambling casinos, the prostitution, the hotels to
go back in business. Who controls those? The mob. So as long as John F. Kennedy
is President and as long as he's trying to kill Castro, and involving the mob
to do so, the criminal element has no complaints, because somewhere down the
line Kennedy may get it done. Certainly he didn't fail for lack of trying. And
when it's done the mob will get a huge source of income. So they'll tolerate
Bobby's continued pressure. And they're not going to talk because they have
Cuba. And they're not going to want to kill Kennedy either. The notion that the
mob would kill Kennedy is stupid. Why kill the goose that's going to lay the
golden egg?

From the archives:

"Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks," by Thomas Powers (August, 1979)"The Bay of Pigs marked the beginning, not the end, of John F. Kennedy's
determination to get rid of Castro, the moment when Fidel Castro ceased to be
merely an enemy inherited from Eisenhower. Kennedy's mandate to General
Maxwell Taylor in April 1961 was, not to fix the blame for the failure of the
invasion, but to find out why it hadn't worked, so the next plan would."

You criticize Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, pointing out
that while he was publicly a tough negotiator, he secretly agreed to a deal
with Khrushchev in which America removed missiles from Turkey in exchange for
the removal of the missiles in Cuba. Why do you consider this to have been a
dangerous negotiating tactic? Did the way this crisis was resolved have
negative effects on our relationship with the Soviet Union?

Jack Kennedy knew Khrushchev was rational, otherwise he never would have
established the quarantine line -- the line that if Khrushchev crosses we're
going to start World War Three. But after the crisis is over Kennedy publicly
gives Khrushchev no credit. Kennedy makes it seem as if he won, hides the fact
that there was a deal. The other side is depicted as this irrational, crazy
Russian bear who made a stab at trying to achieve parity and Kennedy caught him
and kicked him and drove him back with his tail between his legs and his nose
in the dirt. That's how we win the bargain when both sides have nuclear
weapons? That's wacky.

The secret deal hurt Khrushchev because it exposed him to a lot of ridicule
internally and probably was a factor in his overthrow in 1964. Once Khrushchev
pulled out of the missile crisis, Kennedy should have done everything he could
to make it easy for him. That would have been the start of a new development in
nuclear disarmament. Khrushchev was saying, I don't want to go to war. Instead
Kennedy took a cheap political victory that he wanted badly. And he left a
terrible legacy for the next President: Don't negotiate with the Russians. And
Kennedy lets Adlai Stevenson, the one guy on his advisory committee for the
Cuban Missile Crisis who publicly supported a Turkish-Cuban missile deal, be
destroyed in an article in The Saturday Evening Post. Six weeks after
the missile crisis Stevenson was depicted in a column written by Charles
Bartlett, and approved by Kennedy before it was published, as advocating a
Munich appeasement.

Why would Khrushchev have agreed to keep the Turkey deal a
secret?

Because he was so eager to get out of Cuba. Kennedy seemed so irrational
to him. He was so scared by Kennedy that I think he was ecstatic to get out
with anything. Some historians now believe that if Khrushchev had waited a day
Kennedy would have publicly agreed to the trade. Khrushchev didn't want to take the
chance. Kennedy was losing control of his military, especially after the
Russians shot down a U-2, and Khrushchev was losing control of his. He wanted
to get this thing resolved. I think Khrushchev was much more pragmatic and
cautious than Kennedy was.

Kenneth O'Donnell reported in his book about Kennedy, Johnny, We Hardly
Knew Ye (1970), that JFK told him that he would pull out of Vietnam in
1965, after the election, but that he couldn't do it before then because, "We
would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands." If this was Kennedy's
future policy, then why did Johnson escalate the war after becoming
President?

From the archives:

"How Could Vietnam Happen? -- An Autopsy," by James C. Thompson, Jr. (April, 1968)"From the beginning of John Kennedy's Administration into this
fifth year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, substantially the
same small group of men have presided over the destiny of the
United States. In that time they have carried the country from a
limited involvement in Vietnam into a war that is brutal, probably
unwinnable, and, to an increasing body of opinion, calamitous
and immoral. How could it happen?"

I have a motto that emerged out of this book: Don't die in office
without telling the Vice President your policy. Johnson never knew the war
policy. All Johnson knew was the public line, which was that Jack Kennedy was
the ardent anti-communist, willing to stand down the Russians, willing to use
nuclear weapons. Johnson comes in with the missile crisis as a model for
negotiating, and then tells the North Vietnamese that we'll settle the war
under our terms only. If Johnson had known, even if Kennedy's close aides had
known that there was negotiating in private, he might have gone to the Russians
and asked them to broker something with Vietnam. Johnson was worried in 1964
that if he didn't keep the war going that Bobby Kennedy would attack him from
the right for not carrying on his brother's war.

I think Jack Kennedy might have wanted to end the war, but I don't think
there's anything wonderful in that. Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South
Vietnam, offered him a chance to end the war in 1963, but it came too early. He
wanted to end it in 1965 after the election. So he had to have Diem overthrown.
My belief is that Kennedy had to have known that Diem was going to be killed in
the coup, but I'll never be able to prove that.

You have written several controversial investigative books. Has the response
to this one been significantly different? Have you been surprised by the
vociferousness of many of the responses?

I haven't been surprised, but I'm a little appalled by some of the
stupid reviewers. I can't believe the number of people who have reviewed this
book without really reading it, at least in my opinion. They get a chapter that
drives them crazy and they write about it. I don't think they're inventing it; I think they genuinely believe it's
a lousy book. This is a very petty business
I work in, the newspaper business. A lot of people don't want to be told that
they're wrong by some smart aleck. I've been here before. With the My Lai stuff
there were weeks in which every GI who went to the enlisted men's club and had
two beers would call me up at home and tell me what he was going to do to my
private parts. The response to this has been worse in the sense that my fellow
liberals are mad at me, so a lot of people who normally would be giving me
hosannas are really angry at me. People like the Kennedys.

There were wonderful things about John F. Kennedy. There were also much worse
things than have been known.